Not one, not two, but three major-college basketball head coaches have gone before microphones and cameras and staked out a clear position on an issue of worldwide importance … that has nothing to do with their sport.

Why? Because they could. They’re sports celebrities, and they had a platform. For once, they used it. They weren’t worried if it was the “proper” time and place. They made it proper.

It took an incident as horrific, as catastrophic and as life-altering as the Newtown school massacre to push them, and all who joined them, to action. Some positive results need to come from that, and this might be one of them—sports has the eyes, ears and hearts of America. Never be afraid to take advantage of it for the good of society.

As Winthrop basketball coach Pat Kelsey put it this week after his team played Ohio State: “I know this microphone’s powerful right now, because we’re playing the fourth-best team in the country. I’m not gonna have a microphone like this the rest of the year, maybe the rest of my life.’’

Kelsey wasn’t far off. Actually, he has that microphone every day. So do Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and Louisville’s Rick Pitino, the ones who have spoken up recently, as well as the coaches who have openly agreed with them.

They’re Division I basketball coaches. It’s part of their job description to lead, to be forceful, to be vocal and to take principled stands. They have youth in their charge. They also have cameras on them 24-7, because their product—outsized personalities included—are worth billions of dollars.

The public, right or wrong, demands that everybody in the business of sports be a role model. It’s part of the business model, in fact; the kids, they look up to you. How are you going to act?

Here’s one way: Act like a responsible citizen and be a vehicle for change when change is desperately needed. Even if, in this case, if the solution is even more tangled, conflicted and maddening than the problem.

Of course, nobody is unaware of the drawbacks to this. The public doesn’t really want that kind of role model. It wants comfort, not controversy. It wants mythology and escape, not grim reality.

To cite a very recent and relevant example, it doesn’t want its weekly prime-time NFL game sullied by a two-minute commentary about the prevalence of gun violence.

Bob Costas was roasted across the nation for daring to introduce the topic at halftime of NBC's game one day after the Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend to death, then killed himself. Remember, Costas isn’t just a sports talking head—he hosts a network news magazine show, on which he’d conducted the most memorable of Jerry Sandusky’s post-arrest interviews a year earlier.

Yet the reaction to the gun-violence remarks took the usual “he’s there to talk football, not news” tone.

No wonder not a single other athlete or coach in any league or any sport broached the subject that strongly afterward. Nor did any condemn drunken-driving with the same bluntness a week later, when the Cowboys’ Josh Brent was arrested for intoxicated manslaughter in an accident that killed a teammate.

None of those incidents was enough to make athletes or coaches or anyone else in their realm break the conspiracy of silence. They weren’t enough to make anyone do as Kelsey did, to take the microphone and stand before the cameras that were always there, and use them the way they were meant to be used, by the people in the greatest position to use them.

Getting them to use them on topics affecting their very sports is too much pulling teeth. It always has been. Too much to lose by speaking one’s mind, rather than by just performing when told to. Could tick off the wrong people, and that could cost you.

Well, that’s just the self-absorbed modern athlete, right? Wrong.

Curt Flood couldn’t get any fellow players to stand with him in his legal fight for free agency. Boxers were not lining up to support Muhammad Ali as he fought the government on the draft and the Vietnam War. Tommie Smith and John Carlos protested when and where they did at the 1968 Olympics because none of the American athletes in the previous week of competition would do it himself.

They knew what the reaction to stepping out of their prescribed box would be—exactly what it usually is today: “Just shut up and play.’’

It’s the nature of the game. The day the public acts mature and responsible enough to open itself up to the voices, and the humanity, of the people they count on strictly for entertainment, is the day that will change.

That day may have arrived. This time, finally, nobody is telling Kelsey, Boeheim, Pitino and the others to shut up and coach.

It no longer matters why those slayings dug through the layers and touched these coaches’ consciences, when the previous years of bloodbaths and death tolls and lost generations of children did not.

Newtown shook those consciences loose, and their tongues loosened as well. Maybe now, everybody in sports who lives for those microphones will find their voices, too, for whatever issue means something to them.